Josh Mack blogging at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, and occasionally on; bicycles, politics, Brooklyn, parenting, crafts, and good reading. Currently helping to build a new NYC neighborhood news site - nearsay.com, that celebrates the voices that make our city. Subscribe to the daily newsletter it gives you what you need to know.

One of the founders of Mr. Softee died over the weekend and the obituary in the NYT had the history and lyrics to the song that is now playing constantly by the playground on my block.

"Written in E-flat major in jaunty 6/8 time, the jingle was created
by an advertising agency in 1960 for the company's early radio
campaigns. Though the trucks play only an instrumental version, the
tune does have words:

May 30, 2006

A friend turned me on to Daniel Radosh's site where among other very readable things he hosts a weekly anti-caption contest for the selected cartoon in The New Yorker's contest. Often the captions are far better than the official entries.

So since they asked I just voted on my three most important goals for MoveOn and next to the choices
I noticed the option to "see what other members have to say" clicking this took me to ActionForum which is a very interesting board technology that seems to have been developed by MoveOn , at least the whois info for actionforum.com points to them. It uses posts and ratings to convert a thread to a tool for decision making and activism.

"
The forum serves as a public meeting place where people can share their
thoughts and ideas with MoveOn and others. The forum consists of two
lists: a top comments list ordered by how important people feel the
comment is, and a recent comments list ordered by time with the most
recent at the beginning. The front page shows the top five top
comments with links to view more top comments. After this is the five
most recent comments followed with links to more recent comments. If
you register, you can indicate if you agree--or not--with the comments
and how important you feel the comments are. You can also submit your
own comment. The forum is open to all, so the views expressed do not
necessarily reflect the views of MoveOn or its members.

The actionforum page reads like a product page so perhaps they will roll this out to other organizations.

May 26, 2006

CNN is reporting a story that the debate over which came first the chicken or the egg has been decided in favor of the egg. This large and pressing question was finally put to bed by Disney University to help celebrate the release of the Chicken Little DVD. But Disney is not alone in helping to spur major advances in human thought, Sony College is responsible for theological discussions as a result of work to help drive people to their cross-disciplinary course on Da Vinci and semiotics. Taking a look at the current movies it seems that so much more could be done by these studio owned institutions; the Marvel Medical College staff could have used X-men The Last Stand as a great beginning for a discussion of stem-cell research; UC Paramount's School of Urban Planning could have made better use of Over the Hedge as starting point for fighting urban sprawl; Poseidon which was put out by Warner Brother's Oceanic Research Center as a fund-raising device could have done more with their exploration of the cruise industries waste disposal techniques. One course that is also causing much discussion is An Inconvenient Truth but sadly not all of the students are listening, content as they are to get their gentleman's C's.

What I find interesting about the announcement is how dismissive Rafat and others' attitudes are about it. I realize that the CEO brought up the MySpace comparison but I think that the reality is that it makes a lot of sense for them to revamp the site with user generated content as a focus. Martha has rabid fans, they stand in line for her cookbooks,
and name their dogs after hers, her magazine is filled with projects and
recipes(some of which I’ll even admit to doing), so the idea of her readers being
able to share their results and help each other make them perfect will probably
have great appeal. They have great editors who can also contribute, and most
importantly (according to NPR) the whole thing ties into their site which has a large commerce component. So getting
people to the site and then near the store makes sense. I think they are using
the term social network because it is hot when what they are really doing is
simply re-launching their site to take advantage of the user driven content and
that isn’t as sexy. When HomeDepot launches something similar I bet they say the same thing.

“In Williamsburg, everyone’s kind of illiterate.
Relatively,” said Christian, a 29-year-old Williamsburg transplant who
moved there from Park Slope and regrets it. “One time I was on the L
train, and the girl sitting next to me was reading Women in Love, and I
said, ‘That’s good—have you read The Rainbow?’ And she said, ‘No, this
is my first Lawrence—is it all so deep and philosophical?’ And I was
like, ‘Yeah … it’s literature.’”

Susan Mernit - "Over and over, proof comes in that one of the key acquisition--and
retention--tools for users today are widgets that create distributed
access to information--is it any surprise that the same functionality
would appeal to the web folks at a weekly magazine?" From a post on Time's use of a related links widget from Sphere. A really interesting post.

A clique (klɪk, klik) is an informal and restricted social group formed by a number of people who share common interests - formal social groups are referred to as societies or organizations. Cliques are most notably found amongst groups of teenagers, primarily in high schools and colleges, often thought more prominent amongst females, but also in other similar environments not to mention politics.

Cliques at times have complex structures, and characteristics tend
to differ between one another. However, one characteristic which is
common to all cliques is the existence of a defined power structure,
generally comprised of a leader (or a few leaders), followers (refer to the article on leadership) and pariahs.
Thus, it is inaccurate to describe all social groups of teenagers as
cliques, as often said groups do not have any particular power
structure

May 22, 2006

"Harvey put me on the list +2" - Asmallworld.net "an exclusive" social network site gets funding. The lucky few get a chance to exchange restaurant tips with Quentin Tarantino, Ivanka Trump and Naomi Campbell. I suppose from a luxury advertising standpoint this probably makes sense but, boy oh boy, it is a club I am happy not to join (not that I'll be asked).

Treehugger post about how to use and navigate to their archives. More sites should have this in a _how to use our site FAQ. One could assume that Treehugger has a pretty web-savvy audience. After all they are reading an environmental blog so the fact that they are trying to help their audience fine their archives means that more mainstream sites should do the same.

Leonard Lopate on WNYC this morning on newspapers in a digital age. Editors from the Wash Post and the NYT talking about their sites, users, and resource allocations.

I find myself to be among the legions of people who are upset about the injury to Barbaro. I find it odd, since I don't know the horse and don't really follow horse racing. So it's nice to see a NYT article that tries to explain it.

May 17, 2006

One of the things we did when we were in Chicago over the weekend was visit Millennium Park. It was my first time there and I noticed how clean and green it was. Coincidentally the NYT ran an article about this in yesterday's paper.

The desire of all creators is for their works to find their way into
all minds. A text, a melody, a picture or a story succeeds best if it
is connected to as many ideas and other works as possible. Ideally,
over time a work becomes so entangled in a culture that it appears to
be inseparable from it, in the way that the Bible, Shakespeare's plays,
"Cinderella" and the Mona Lisa are inseparable from ours. This tendency
for creative ideas to infiltrate other works is great news for culture.
In fact, this commingling of creations is culture...Almost everything created today will not return to the commons until
the next century. Thus the stream of shared material that anyone can
improve (think "A Thousand and One Nights" or "Amazing Grace" or
"Beauty and the Beast") will largely dry up.

Not that rotisserie baseball is that cultural but if all of the stats and players names are the property of the Major League's internet company then mighty Casey will have struck out. More importantly it might not be written, if he had been real, you get the point.

May 15, 2006

"Everyone in this goddamned store is wearing a blue shirt and nobody knows a thing!" -improv everywhere pulls and then documents a very funny prank at Best Buy.

Writing about documents Kevin Kelly's NYT article about digitizing books is a must read and contains such nuggets as this; "From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have
"published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays,
25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos,
TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages."

We were in Chicago over the weekend and one of the things we did was take a walking tour of the Columbian Expostion of 1893. Other than the Museum of Science & Industry there is nothing left of The White City. At the fair Otis elevator was demonstrating the elevator, the kinetoscope was introduced, people were discovering the phone, and electricity was shown off as the city was brighly lit, and a century later the first of 100 billion web pages were created.

Perhaps it has been there for a while but I just noticed that kottke.org has an ad on it. Part of The DECK network. The site lays out the details: nine ads * $4,400 a month /7 sites = $5650 per month per site which I think is a 3.63 cpm on their 16 million plus pv per month. The DECK says that they aren't selling by cpm but by "cost per influence". It is a low rate but I guess I'm confused as to why their "cost of influence" is so low. Why this system versus blogads?

Article about Pearl Jam and their embrace of user generated content. (need to be a mediapost member to see it)

May 09, 2006

Here are some highlights from "Let's Have a Three-Way" Huffington's ASME talk. - I like, employ the people who get the Internet regardless of whether or not they roll in at noon. I would add it would be great if they could tele-commute once in a while. I also like find out who on your staff blogs and get them involved

Dolphins recognize each other by name.
In other news from nature my sister's bees are acting up. Apparently
they are too crowded after a long winter and unless she puts on a new
super they might swarm. She is also back to posting about them though I'm confused by her last post. She refers to them as the girls but I thought other than the queen they were all boys.

Google map hack that shows what the NYC area will look like if the sea level rises. At 3 meters Red Hook begins to look like its 1800's island self. (via Curbed via Kottke) As a side note, this would make the potential Gowanus Expressway tunnel obsolete shortly after it's completion. (via hello.typepad)

May 08, 2006

" The gentrification of exhibitionism", the last line of a Slate article about the videos now appearing in the NYT weddings section. It's a fun article but I wonder if the author has spent any time on Veiled Conceit, a funny blog devoted to the examination of NYT wedding announcements.

Arianna Huffington is speaking to ASME today and in preparation last Friday she wrote an interesting post about magazines and the Internet. I've been thinking about her post and also my post from May 4th. I love magazines and imagine I will read them as long as they are being printed, so my comments as an observer of multiple media companies moves were more about the culture of some general interest magazines and whether they will be able to swallow their egos and expand their brands online. Arianna writes about niche magazines having a wonderful potential online and I agree. Large magazines could have a bright future online as well if they follow the advice in Folio. There are other ways to build businesses and have influence online than becoming a single large destination. I hope her comments go over well and that she posts them.

Article in the NYT about the fact that more people are watching rained out NASCAR events than the NBA playoff's. In other words NOTHING.

And also reading about moves at my soon to be new employer in PaidContent and others.

It is so great that Central Park and Prospect Park are going to be closed to cars during the weekday. It is amazing that it took this long when you think but it is a small step to reclaiming a city overrun by cars.

Officials estimated that approximately 865 vehicles would be affected
by the Central Park closures and about 357 by those in Prospect Park.
By contrast, Mr. Bloomberg said, on weekdays an average of 70,000
people use Central Park and 15,000 use Prospect Park.

On the subject of car free(ness), I rode in the 5 boro ride this weekend and have to say that riding with 30,000 people on the BQE isn't that much different than driving on the BQE. Bad cyclists abounded riding SUV like bikes or too small racing bikes weaving in and out of traffic with the same abandon as do drivers on these roads. When you add in the mile or so walked at bottlenecks it was not, at least for me, a recipe for fun. I'll take river road or even laps in a now carless park any time.

101 Cookbooks - It's been a little while since I checked in on this site. Always a great blog it now has boards, journals from other food writers, a member area and some nice ads.A very good example of how to create a new community and perhaps a media play of some value. By the way the reason I wnet to it is that it appeared as a "web clip" in my g-mail. Nice!